The Red Daughter Read online

Oh dear, murmurs Gus.

  I glance up and see compassion in his faded blue eyes.

  I don’t suppose you’d like to come with me to the club? It really is a very nice place to relax.

  No, thank you.

  No, of course not, why would you? Well, we’ll meet for dinner then, as usual? I have a new Brahms record I think you might like.

  I nod and blow my nose, adding another balled tissue to the pile, and he backs gently out of the room, shutting the door softly. A minute or so later, I hear his car—a magnificent Buick convertible about six meters long—roar to life in the driveway, then move slowly out into the quiet street and away.

  I rest my cheek against my son’s letter. Fearing that this, right now, might be the closest I will ever come to my children again.

  7 June

  Egypt and Israel are now at war, joining America and Vietnam. Meanwhile, here in Locust Valley, we have our own little United Nations.

  I am informed that the bus that has been parked near the house all this past week belongs to an Italian television company. Who knew Italians could be so patient and watchful? The best they could manage thus far, Gus tells me with a glint of victory in his eye, was an interview with the Polish gardener. As the gardener speaks very little English and no Italian, I’m not sure what news he was able to provide, save for the fact that I seem to be especially fond of azaleas.

  The two private security men who have taken up virtual residence in the kitchen downstairs are brothers from Budapest. Together they must weigh three hundred kilos. They take turns eating vast quantities of the stews and chops prepared by Gus’s German housekeeper, who grumbles about the added work but cannot help looking pleased at the reception her food is getting. The brothers are unfailingly courteous to me, despite the fact that it was the Soviet Army’s invasion that forced them to flee their country. It is their job to scare away the newsmen who come every day to photograph the house and the windows of my borrowed room, my one haven in this place, which more and more I am reluctant to leave.

  The other day, however, my translator, Marina, came for a visit (“consultation with the author,” she called it), and she and her father coaxed me out for a shopping expedition in town. We were accompanied on our walk by Gus’s Irish setter Geronimo, whose nervous and overbred disposition was not helped by the noise from the news helicopters following us everywhere we went. No surprise then that by the time we reached Main Street, there were gawkers and photographers everywhere we turned.

  * * *

  —

  My translator desires me to buy new shoes. On this point she is strangely insistent. Her intimation, not in so many words, is that the shoes I have brought with me to this country are representative of a discredited, evil time in history. Actually, I want to tell her, they are just shoes, and French. Marina herself, I observe, has large American feet. Blond and rangy and long of limb, she is a woman who clearly spent much of her childhood playing tennis and riding horses; stallion is a favorite word. Her Russian she learned at college under scholars of varying quality, I would say.

  She desires me to buy several pairs of shoes at once. Apparently what one does in America, as soon as one can, is buy as many of everything as possible. Without asking me what catches my fancy, she takes the store manager over to the window and points out several pairs of the latest styles for me to try on. All have substantial heels to improve my meager height. When after ten minutes I agree to buy only one pair of low-heeled walking shoes, and insist on paying for them with my own money, I can see the disappointment in her face, much as she tries to hide it. Perhaps my stubbornness and lack of appreciation for commercial opportunity and high fashion are traits associated in her mind with the world I come from, the anticulture of Soviet Russia. At any rate, the shoes I buy with my own money are shoes that I can see myself walking in anywhere in the world, not just in Locust Valley, New York.

  Because—I want to grab her and say—anywhere in the world is a place I might still go. And so I must be ready, in case that happens.

  25 June

  Today at a UN press conference, Kosygin delivered Moscow’s first public remarks about me since my defection:

  Alliluyeva is a morally unstable person and she’s a sick person and we can only pity those who wish to use her for any political aims or to discredit the Soviet country.

  26 June

  Tonight Gus takes me in his Buick convertible, the top pushed down, to his favorite restaurant on the Long Island seashore for a farewell dinner. Though no longer young, he drives rapidly but with ease, a look of quiet refreshment on his face, dipping the steering wheel this way and that with the first two fingers of his right hand.

  We come to the coast road and there is the moon, full and fat, suspended above the silver-streaked ocean, brackish wind in our faces. And I cannot explain it: suddenly each breath I take, braced with salt and memory, strikes my heart like a blow.

  * * *

  —

  The restaurant is a steak house, that temple of carnivore abundance that Americans must be dreaming of when they exclaim to each other, with genial innocence and a boundless smile, You know, I think I could eat a horse! The Stars and Stripes flaps and snaps in the ocean breeze atop a tall metal pole beside the parking lot. The other cars filling the area are as long as Gus’s, some even more handsome. The dear man looks faintly crestfallen when I don’t wait for him to open my door.

  We are seated at a table near a potted tree. In Russia, the grim half joke goes, even the potted trees have been cut down. Vodka martinis are brought. A few stares from other customers, but for once no reporters. Gus is charming in his boyish enthusiasm at having eluded them. I’ve always wanted to drive at Le Mans, he says with a wink. I have no idea what he’s talking about. The shrimp cocktail is very fresh here, he adds with gallant sincerity. And then I’d recommend the sirloin, medium rare. It’s the house specialty. Declaiming his best intentions thus, his voice is suddenly more than it was a minute ago—deeper, more confident—and I feel myself happy to be under his care for the evening.

  * * *

  —

  Is the steak cooked enough for you?

  Oh, yes.

  Would you like some more creamed corn?

  No, thank you, Gus. Too rich.

  A waiter in a tuxedo pours us more wine.

  Is Russian food anything like this? asks Gus.

  I pretend to think for a moment, already knowing my answer: Not really.

  Apple pie à la mode follows. Then we drive home under stars, moon, moist air, salt wind. Gus turns on the radio, twists the dial. It is not classical music or American jazz that he chooses but Elvis Presley singing “Long Legged Girl.” To my astonishment Gus begins whistling along with Elvis, his left hand playing rhythm on the outside of the car, his self-made notes dry but on key, quickly swept away by the onrushing wind.

  The light on his front porch must have been on all the time we were at dinner: shining, it welcomes us back now. The car doors open and close like steel wings. Gus pours us a nightcap. We sit on the porch with our drinks, gently swinging and creaking on a wooden bench hung from the beams by chains.

  4 July

  I have been now for a week on Block Island with Peter and his wife, Martha, and their young daughter, Jean. From their rented cottage, covered like so many others here with wooden shingles, you can’t see the ocean, but you can smell it, and at certain times hear it. My hair and skin have grown soft from the salt in the moist island air. Even the tap water has a faint briny flavor, reminding one that this is but a tiny outcrop of rock where no one is ever very far from the sea; or from the cliffs that have been a hazard to ships and submarines for two hundred years, frequently sinking them; or from the graves of the Native Indians who were the original settlers here, and who, when they were not slaughtering each other, were massacred by the white islanders without a thought. Or so I hav
e heard.

  But America’s birthday is perhaps not the day for such histories. The main town is awash in red, white, and blue. I have never seen so many stars and so many stripes, to say nothing of watermelons, hot dogs, corn on the cob. Members of the local fire department shoot a cannon out into the bay—no bullets, only water, powerful and oddly thrilling. I am with Peter among the crowd at Old Harbor. (Martha has taken Jean off to meet a group of young mothers and their children.) Like the other men, he wears a white tennis shirt, khaki short trousers, and sunglasses like the ones Vasily and his pilot friends used to wear after a night of drinking. Smelling of a suntan lotion called Coppertone, his jaw darkened by a scrim of unshaven beard, my lawyer looks rather reborn in this place, his own master finally, no longer the young legal apprentice. Of course, I do not tell him this because I do not think he would consider it a compliment.

  What do I know about Peter? Only what he has told me in fits and starts. He grew up on the outskirts of a small Pennsylvania city—a depressed place, they say here, as though describing a person. His father had some permanent illness or disability that affected his fitness to work; there was never quite enough money. Peter was an only child. He sat alone on the school bus, at the front, staring each day at the same wheat fields and dying factories, dreaming of escape to a bigger and better city. They were Jews, and on Friday evenings, whether his father was well or not, Peter accompanied his parents to the city’s only synagogue for services. The intensity of his prayers exhausted him. And then his father died, and he never prayed again.

  It is late afternoon. The fire truck with the water cannon has driven away. The crowd is starting to thin. I try to remember whether from the Swiss Air plane that brought me to this country these dozens of sailboats and motor yachts anchored here, with their white hulls gleaming of money and privilege, were part of the island I saw, my first sight of America.

  You must come and stay with me and my family.

  But of course, I realize, we would have been too high up. Only the crude shape of the island would have been discernible, not its details.

  There will be fireworks on the public beach tonight, I have been told, of a kind that will amaze the young and the old alike.

  I think of Josef and Katya, alone without their mother.

  9 July

  It rains today, all day, rain tapping ceaselessly on the shingled cottage roof and falling in slower fatter drops, like little wet deaths, from the eaves and gutters onto the wooden boards of the back porch. One of those days where you wake to rain and go to sleep to rain. The sheets and towels damp from the rain in the air accumulated over so many hours and days. The pages of this notebook damp, absorbing too much ink. The air cool and not like summer.

  Peter lays a fire first thing in the morning. He crumples pages from a recent New York Times—one containing an item about me—into a pile on the andirons (each in the shape of an owl) inside the brick fireplace, and then stacks several sticks crosswise over this messy bed, followed by two split logs. As the paper flickers into flame and smoke begins curling up into his face, he steps back, his expression anxious. Damp, he mutters.

  We are drinking mugs of hot coffee in the living room. Mingled with the woodsmoke is the smell of the bacon Martha is frying in the kitchen. Martha, I have noticed, keeps to herself in the morning. She is awake and functional when I come down at around eight, the coffee made, the cereal box and milk set out at the kitchen table for Jean. (She is a very conscientious mother.) Something is always on the stove. Her clothes and hair are casual but neat. She is polite and considerate to me. But to draw anything richer or more spontaneous from her in the first half of the day is to fish for foxes, as my dear nurse used to say. And the rest of the day is not much more fruitful.

  And yet, from the evidence, Martha Horvath would not seem to be a woman without strong currents. A few times since my arrival, as I was getting dressed for dinner, I thought I overheard the whispered edge of a private quarrel she was having with Peter in their bedroom; once, I was quite certain I heard her say my name. But in my presence her mood and demeanor are admirably placid. A certain rote quality almost, something learned rather than felt. Which jam do I prefer, strawberry or raspberry? Which meat for dinner, pork chop or hamburger? Do we use suntan lotion in the Soviet Union? Do we eat spaghetti? Does Block Island remind me of any place from home? She is careful, determined even, not to initiate any more complex connection between us, anything that might spill into unwanted intimacy—in case, I half-suspect, I were to seize on a loose thread of feminine warmth as a pretext for extending my visit beyond the month already planned. It is also possible that she resents me for my blood. Not once during my stay, for example—though her cottage has frequently been filled with curious guests and journalists doing just this—has she mentioned or asked me about my father.

  The wood catches. The flames rise and fill, and the glass eyes of the iron owls glow amber. Wherever you sit, the owl’s gaze will find you, as though seeking you alone. But to exert his haunting power—you realize only later—he must have a fire always lit behind him; or else his eyes are dead.

  Peter, not believing in the fire that burns before his eyes, pokes at it anxiously with an iron tool.

  And staring at his long back, I ask myself: if Martha Horvath is a person of some control, her most unruly feelings held in check behind a façade of polite gesture, then what of her husband? What is a lawyer, after all, but one who has strategically guaranteed his own place in society as the asker of questions and the giver of wise counsel? For such a man, the mirror only ever points outward, to the safety of another’s distress. His role requires no real personal exposure on his part.

  So why does it sometimes feel as if I were the one who carried Peter to freedom in the middle of the night, and not the other way around? And that he, in his private heart, believes the same?

  18 July

  I am taken to a dinner party in town. A babysitter arrives for Jean, and I ride with Peter and Martha in their Chevrolet across the island to one of the houses that line the road from the harbor. According to Martha, the Penshaws are among the original Block Island families, very old New England. (Is this not a contradiction in terms?)

  Blue bloods, Peter mutters.

  I am confused. What blue?

  Yes, well, responds Martha, a sudden edge to her voice. Be that as it may, the current Penshaws, Jasper and Raisa—

  She is Russian?

  Yes. Peter didn’t tell you?

  No, Peter did not. An apologetic wave from the driver’s seat. Raisa Malinov, Jasper’s wife, has translated Akhmatova and Voznesensky, he says. Very plugged into the émigré literary scene in New York. She was determined to meet you.

  The house is impressive, Federal style. (Martha is a fount of such terms.) Warm light from high front windows turns the sidewalk bricks to bronze. Panes of old fine glass. A brass knocker, and a brass bell too.

  Our host, Jasper Penshaw, opens the door, extends a hand. A voice not so much restrained as never let out of its throne room: his jaw remains almost still, his lips do not move. His hair is gray with touches of copper. His posture in a navy blue sport coat is erect but with the conscious addition of a very slight stoop, as if to stand any taller would be in bad taste. The end of his necktie disappears into the opening between two of the horn buttons of his light blue shirt. What could this mean? Not a moment to ponder, however, for now his Russian lady is upon me with magnificent cleavage and a flounce of mahogany curls, brushing my cheeks with her own, leaving traces of rouge and French rose.

  How pleased I am to meet you! I am Raisa Malinov. Come, come and meet our distinguished guests.

  And I see at once what sort of evening this is going to be. Her voice that melodious stage whisper that we Russians created: she is speaking not to me but to the balconies of history in her own heroic émigré narrative. Very well. If this is the price of hearing my ow
n language for a couple of hours, I accept, even if listening to her is like having an overstewed fruit preserve fed into one’s mouth a silver spoonful at a time. What one needs is the tannic corrective of a strong cup of black tea—or some vodka.

  An eminent literary publisher; an Associated Press journalist recently returned from Vietnam; a director of a New York bank; a female novelist of some repute; a slim woman with a man’s haircut wearing clothes of her own design; and several more blue bloods—these are my fellow dinner guests. The journalist approaches first, hands me a large glass of vodka to match his own. I thought you might appreciate one of these, he says.

  I accept, thank you.

  He raises his glass to my eye level and drinks. Budem zdorovy.

  I smile. You speak Russian?

  No. But I can say Cheers in twelve languages.

  That is clever.

  Useful at dinner parties, anyway. Tell me something. How does it feel to defect to America only to realize that this government is run by fucking liars too?

  I am not surprised, I reply. Governments will always lie. It is the job of artists and intellectuals to tell the truth.

  All right. But when a government’s lies are criminal and go unpunished, they make liars out of everyone.

  I refuse to accept responsibility for other people’s lies. Only my own.

  Again he raises his glass at me, but this time I sense something ironic in the gesture.

  You are mocking me.

  Not at all. He is quite a lot taller than I, with a canny well-worn face, and I must crane my head to meet his steady, penetrating stare. The whites of his eyes are stippled with blood veins.

  I don’t believe you.

  His grin disarms me. Hey, it’s a free country, right? His impudence reminds me of Vasily: the reckless manners of a prince who has been drinking since breakfast.

  Of course. Why else would I have come here?